Letter to New TAs

Distributed August 2007

August 2, 2007

Welcome to the English 100 teaching staff for Fall 2007. While the start of a new academic year is always exhilarating as we welcome new graduate students beginning their careers at Wisconsin and renew friendships among returning staff, this fall is an especially exciting time as the program embarks on a new era with a change in program leadership. As the new director of English 100 and a new faculty member in the Department of English, I look forward to sharing in the experience of learning about the university, department, and program with you. This will help me understand what the teaching staff, especially new instructors, face in the delivery of the course and negotiation of the university. Like you, I will rely on the expertise of the programÕs new associate director, Mary Fiorenza, and assistant directors, Matthew Capedeville and Katie Lynch. Given this "new era," I invite all of you to help shape the program through your ideas, conversations, and experience as instructors of writing.

Now to some of the details of the upcoming academic year. Fall orientation for English 100 TAs will begin Monday, August 27, at 9:00 am in 6191 Helen C. White Hall and run through the week (a tentative schedule will soon be posted to the English 100 Instructor homepage). The sessions on August 27, 28, 29, and 31 are mandatory for ALL new English 100 TAs. The session on Friday, August 31, will be for the entire staff, new and returning, although we encourage returning TAs to attend earlier sessions. Full details about orientation dates, times, and venues were sent with your appointment letter.

All new English 100 TAs are also required to attend staff meetings during the Fall semester. You can receive one credit for attending these meetings, which constitute a graduate course entitled Practicum in the Teaching of Writing (English 790). If you want to receive credit, please register for ENG 790 through the "My UW" web portal during the registration period. While there are two sections to choose from, we want to create as much balance as possible between sections. Please consult with me before selecting a section/time.

Let me now turn to the course itself. With close to 50 sections and nearly 900 students a semester, English 100 (Freshman Composition) is the English Department's largest teaching effort and one of this university's most important educational projects. The course satisfies the "Communication A" requirement of UW-Madison's general education program, meant to ensure that all of our students acquire basic skills in the four modes of literacy - writing, speaking, reading, and listening - with special emphasis on writing. As an English 100 TA, you will have considerable autonomy in conducting your section of the course and helping your students improve their writing. There are, however, program-wide policies, including a model syllabus which sets the curricular tone for the program and is followed especially closely by TAs the first time they teach the course. Instructors who've taught English 100 before are free to modify the syllabus in ways that take advantage of their own teaching styles and interests, though all sections of the course must satisfy the university's "Comm A" criteria and conform to English 100 guidelines. The model syllabus for English 100 is built around a sequence of assignments designed to help our students develop as critical writers: to give them practice in the intellectual, social, and material processes of writing itself; to help them create and engage texts that are complex, sophisticated, and aesthetic; and to increase their self-consciousness about writing's place in academic inquiry, professional communication, social and political discourse, and personal development. The course therefore puts writing - not theory, not reading, not some particular theme or issue - at center stage and makes the students' own writing the central text of the course. As you'll see in the brief synopsis included on the instructor website [include website address], students move from responding to an opening prompt to summarizing and synthesizing other voices on the same topic to developing a relevant question about which they are curious and conducting research meant to help them answer that question to reflecting on their progress across the semester. They produce an essay or draft of an essay nearly every week, writing frequently, in a variety of genres, and in response to increasingly complex assignments from us. Your job as teacher, then, is to provide them with the space and time they need to develop and revise their ideas, to make available to them a range of thoughtful readers for their work, to offer models of effective and responsible writing, and to supply direct instruction when and where it's needed. During Fall training, we will talk about ways to help your students become better composers, revisers, critics, editors, and analysts of written language. And we will help you become better readers of and responders to their writing.

Over the summer, we have continued to revise and refine the model syllabus and compiled materials to support it. As the academic year progresses and as I and the English 100 administration settle in, we will continue to think about the syllabus and course, and we always welcome your input on how to improve content, assignments, and pedagogical approaches to the teaching of writing. In the meantime, please visit the instructor website to get a fuller sense of the mission and design of English 100. I look forward to seeing you in August. Please feel free to contact me, associate director, Mary Fiorenza, or assistant directors--Matthew Capdevielle and Katie LynchÑif you have any questions or concerns before then.

Morris Young
Associate Professor of English
Director of English 100

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